mecatl (FCbk8f26r)
This iconographic example, featuring a rope or cord (mecatl) is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making comparisons with related hieroglyphs The term selected for this example comes from the keywords chosen by the team behind the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss. This example shows a rope that is wrapped around the neck of a man who is deceased, suggesting that he has been strangled with the rope or cord. His eyes are closed and his head hangs down, facts which suggest that he is dead. He has black hair and brown skin. He wears a white cape that has gray areas of shading that give it a three-dimensionality. The contextualizing image shows his sitting on the ground between two rulers (tlatoque, or tlahtoqueh, with the glottal stops) who are also lords, given the diadem above their heads that is the sign of the word for lord (tecuhtli or teuctli).
Stephanie Wood
Ropes are often white and have diagonal lines that suggest they are some kind of twisted fiber. They were used for a variety of purposes, such as pulling or hauling something, hanging or strangling people, tying shrouds on corpses, and much more.
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
soga, sogas, cordón, cordones, cuerda, cuerdas, estrangular, matar, muerte, morir, ejecutar, ejecución, paliza, escarmiento, castigo
meca(tl), rope or cord, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/mecatl
la soga
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 8: Kings and Lords", fol. 26r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/8/folio/26r/images/0 Accessed 9 August 2025.
Images of the digitized Florentine Codex are made available under the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International). For print-publication quality photos, please contact the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ([email protected]). The Library of Congress has also published this manuscript, using the images of the World Digital Library copy. “The Library of Congress is unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection. Absent any such restrictions, these materials are free to use and reuse.”
